Boots Riley was asked on X why he premiered I Love Boosters at SXSW instead of Cannes. He answered bluntly: "Cannes didn’t pick Sorry To Bother You altho they picked other stuff that had been played in their home country. They picked The Idol over I’m A Virgo. They didn’t pick I Love Boosters. They just don’t like my stuff. All good."
Riley’s response lands while I Love Boosters is already in cinemas. The film opened May 22 in more than 1,750 theaters, had a roughly $20 million budget — Neon’s most expensive film ever produced — and features Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, Taylour Paige, Poppy Liu, Eiza González and LaKeith Stanfield.
Early measures of the film’s reception are mixed: critics’ aggregators showed a 92% fresh score, and reviewers called the movie an absurdist comic send-up of consumerism, but the film made just over $3.5 million in its opening weekend.
The question of festival placement matters because it confers prestige and can change a film’s trajectory. Riley’s earlier film Sorry to Bother You premiered at Sundance in 2018 and received the Sundance Institute’s Vanguard Award; I’m a Virgo premiered in 2023. The Idol, by contrast, premiered at Cannes in 2023 — a decision Riley highlighted in his post — and Cannes has also screened films that had already played in their countries of origin.
Neon, which launched I Love Boosters at SXSW rather than Cannes, has a complicated relationship with the festival circuit: on the same Cannes calendar where Riley says his work was passed over, Neon landed its seventh consecutive Palme d’Or on Saturday thanks to Fjord. That juxtaposition underlines how festival programmers’ tastes and market strategy can diverge sharply from distributors’ plans.
The tension here is simple and personal: Riley says Cannes repeatedly declined to select his work, and the festival’s choices have included projects that audiences elsewhere already saw. Riley’s line — "They just don’t like my stuff. All good." — is both a shrug and a challenge. It acknowledges a pattern of rejection while refusing to treat the snub as fatal.
Riley has already taken the path available to him: premiere at other festivals, secure theatrical distribution and let audiences and critics decide. Sorry to Bother You earned a high-profile Sundance debut and an award in 2018; I Love Boosters opened nationwide after SXSW, and its initial box office and strong critical percentage give it a foothold despite Cannes’ absence.
The immediate test for whether Cannes’ repeated passes matter now is measurable: can I Love Boosters build on a roughly $3.5 million opening weekend and find an audience beyond early reviews? If it does, Riley’s public dismissal of the Cannes snub will look more like an accurate assessment than a consolation. For now, he has made the same choice he’s always made — put the film in front of people — and let the results write the next paragraph.
